


how to get home

by maxmayfield



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Sad Ending, Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-17
Updated: 2018-02-17
Packaged: 2019-03-19 08:24:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13700655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maxmayfield/pseuds/maxmayfield
Summary: When Mike found sunshine in the rain, he draped his coat around her shoulders.





	how to get home

She was sunshine in the rain. 

A girl engulfed by yellow cotton, with fingers trembling by her hipbones, and dewdrops kissing her skin. 

“Take…” he began, but lost his voice to something he had never known before. “Take the light off her.” 

Mike looked to where his friends stood, gazes gleaming as they bickered in the darkness. Their words were shaped like questions — for one another, for him, for the girl — but nobody had any answers.

At his words, they quietened. The rays casted by flashlights flickered away, so that all that was left was the moon. 

He took a step towards her. She seemed frozen as he approached, caught between fear for bullet and rust, and intrigue at the small shapes spattering his flesh. _Pretty_ , she thought, and when he smiled reassuringly at her, _very pretty_.

“Um, hi,” Mike said, his hesitance distorted by gentleness. “Do you need any help?” 

His answer was in her eyes, in the honey coloured horror. She did not speak, and he had an idea as to why she could not bring herself to — she was a child, with her hair buzzed back to the scalp, dressed in nothing but a tee-shirt. She was alone, despite her age, and in the woods, despite what had happened to Will. It was clear to him that nobody was taking care of her; unclear to him, as to why he felt it should now be him. 

“Are you lost?” he asked her, seeking affirmations. 

“ _Mike_ ,” Lucas answered in an agitated hiss, from behind them. “Come on. We’ve gotta go find Will.” 

“We can’t just leave her here!” Mike snapped in response, without a trace of previous tentativeness. 

He noticed her shivering as he turned back to her, and reached for the zipper on his coat without a second thought. He draped its crinkled fabric across her spindly shoulders, ignoring the bite of cold against the tendons of his throat, and she looked up at him with eyes she hoped were thankful. She could recognise that the coat was safe, because it smelled the same as the shirt that the nice man from before had given her. It did not smell clean, like blood and soap and steel, but like the earth, like dirt and sun and sky. 

“Just follow us, okay?” Mike said, as his fingers fell away. “We’ll help you figure out how to get home.” 

 

…

 

She gripped the door with tight knuckles under the glow of the basement bathroom’s light. There was something of a challenge in her eyes, and Mike was transfixed, by the darkness and the depth. 

“You don’t want it closed?” he asked, his tone surprised. 

“No,” she answered, her voice impossibly soft. 

“Oh, so you can speak,” Mike said with a smile, more to himself than to her. “Okay, well, um…” 

“How about… we keep the door… just like this?” he asked, pausing with each creak of wood, until there was an inch separating the door from its frame. “Is that better?” 

He didn’t realise the meaning behind what he’d given her. A choice. 

“Yes,” she said, and felt her heart smiling, even if it didn’t show on her face.

 

…

 

He saw her smile with her teeth for the first time that morning, rocking atop his father’s La-Z-Boy with her cheeks painted rose pink. He had spent the rest of the morning trying to make sense of it, of the fact that hers was the loveliest smile he’d ever seen, of just how much he wanted to hold onto it, onto her, forever.

He had yet to figure it out, when he heard his mother step through the front door. 

“I won’t tell her about you. I _promise_.”

“Promise?” 

He explained to her with hurried words, “It’s something you can’t break. _Ever_.”

El still hesitated. She thought of cherry cans that curled in on themselves at the touch of fingerless hands, of the despondency reflected in the blue gore of her papa’s gaze. She didn’t know much — hadn’t even known her own name, until the day before — but she held a quiet clarity in this. In that everything was breakable. 

But she could not deny what was in Mike’s eyes. They were dark as ever, entangled with stories, intents, and it was enough for El in a way that she could not describe. So, she stepped into the wardrobe, into the darkness, and did her best to breathe as the door filled the corners of the frame, closing under his touch.

The tears fell in ribbons down her face, the sobs building in her throat and pounding at her lungs. There were arms tight around her elbows, and she thrashed desperately, despite knowing that it would do nothing. The steel was cool to the touch under her palms, and she pulled them away bruised yellow as the hours passed. She was raw at the mouth for answerless screams. She was alone, unable to hide. 

Then, there was a crack in the dark. The floating dust gleamed, aflame with new light.

It was the sun.

“El?”

It was him.

“Mike.”

 

…

 

“Stars.”

In the time that had passed, he’d grown used to this. To her way of speaking, to comments and questions caught in the looks on her face and in one word sentences, her soft voice. But this caught him off guard, somewhat. 

“Wh-what?” Mike stammered. 

“You have stars,” she explained, gesturing to his face. 

“Oh,” he said, feeling his cheeks warm with colour. “You mean my freckles?” 

“Freckles,” El repeated, intrigued, with a subtle smile. 

She feathered her fingers across his flushed flesh. 

Mike swallowed, suddenly overly aware of just how pretty she was, of the edge that they teetered. He was young enough for it to be simply enough; for what impended to be true.

“Pretty,” El said, looking at his eyes and not his freckles, before her fingers drooped reluctantly away. 

 

…

 

There was blood on his chin. She noticed it as soon as they began their walk, the piece of overturned skin, and that which crept uneasy inside her. She wanted to ask him about it, but he was impossibly pretty beneath the wreath of blue clouds, his hair soft around his temples, his coat neat on his shoulders. It made her feel shy. It wasn’t until they’d been walking for several miles, until Dustin and Lucas were far enough away to be unable to overhear, that El plucked up the courage to speak. 

“Why do they hurt you?” she asked him, eyes flickering between he and the dirt. 

“What?” he answered, lost partially in his own thoughts, but sagged with understanding when she gestured to his chin. “Oh, that. Uh, I just fell at recess.” 

El almost smiled, eyes cast downwards. She knew that friends didn’t lie, but this didn’t seem like a betrayal to her. She understood, and was somewhat amused, by the familiarity of things feigned where people who seemed bigger were concerned. 

“Mike,” she spoke, to catch his attention. 

“Yeah?” he answered, gaze trained on his fingers and his handlebars. 

“Friends tell the truth,” she reminded him. 

Mike sighed. “I was tripped by this mouthbreather, Troy. Okay?” 

“Mouthbreather?”

“Yeah, you know,” he said, shoulders shrugging. “A dumb person. A knucklehead.” 

“A knucklehead,” El repeated, musingly. 

“I don’t know why I didn’t just tell you…” he said, sighing once more. “Everyone at school knows. I just didn’t want you to think I was such a wastoid, you know?” 

He punctuated his words with a breathless, nervous chuckle. It was the most familiar of phenomenons, in this big new world of El’s. 

“Mike,” she pulled his attention to her. 

“Yeah?” he responded, embarrassed as he met her gaze. 

“I understand,” she told him. The sincerity was blazing.

“Oh. Okay,” he said. “Cool.”

“Cool,” she agreed, smiling on the inside and the outside all at once. 

She was too bright to look at, and he had to look away. He chanced looking back at her, a moment afterwards, and found his smile mirrored on her face. He found that the sun and his heart were intertwined in her eyes. He found that he was falling a little bit more.

 

…

 

The radio felt scratchy in her hands as she fiddled with its buttons. Mike was sitting on a sofa on the other side of the basement, asking her to be quiet, but she ignored him, knowing that she would have to if she wanted to give him what he wanted. He’d scrubbed all of his tear stains away before coming to see her, but they were tattooed on her heart, instead, and she felt heartbroken by him, by the broken blue sky of his eyes. 

“Maybe you thought you were helping, but you weren’t,” he continued. “You _hurt_ me. Do you understand?”

El didn’t really understand. She wasn’t surprised that she had done something wrong, considering that she always seemed to do something wrong, but she was confused by what it had been that she’d done to hurt him. Will had been hiding, yes, but he had been there, and wasn’t that what Mike wanted? She felt sick with his words in her ears, and she held on desperately to the fact that he hadn’t asked her to go back to the wardrobe. 

El wished that she could understand better. She wished that she could understand why hurting things was an obligation of hers; she had never wanted to hurt the animals that papa had presented to her in the lab, and she certainly didn’t want to hurt Mike. Somehow, she couldn’t imagine anything worse. 

 _You hurt me_ became an echo, and her hands began to shake. She looked at Mike, where his eyelashes collided with his freckles, and reached deeper inside. She twisted the static into Will. 

 

…

 

She stood before a mirror framed by a jagged border, that caught the glint of ashen question in her eyes and reflected it twice. Her fingers ghosted her hairline, as the disappointment gnawed at her. 

Before he could overthink his words, Mike told her, “You don’t need it.” 

She looked to him and then back to herself, hesitantly asking, “Still pretty?” 

He thought of the day before, of the girl adorned in rose silk who hesitated in the doorway. He had breathlessly voiced his thoughts before hastening to cover up his feelings, and a smile had lit up her face in a stolen moment of subtle happiness. Now, Mike felt that pretty didn’t say enough about her doe eyes and button nose, the pink tinge to her skin. She reminded him of the fairies from his little sister’s favourite storybooks. 

“Yeah!” Mike exclaimed, gushed. “Pretty, _really_ pretty.”

He watched as she smiled, with her eyes and with her mouth, and found something twitching in his heart. He thought of what mattered most, of her soft soul, her gentle voice, her unwarranted kindness and her disused brilliance. He was mesmerised. 

“El?” he called, softly, his need to tell her overriding his shyness. 

“Yes?” she responded, eyes flicking to meet his once more. 

“Um, I’m happy you’re home,” he said, without realising what he’d just confessed to. 

She could have cried. For the lack of question in his eyes and the truth of his words, for all that he was to her and all that he thought of her, El was overwhelmed. She knew that the words to properly convey her thanks didn’t exist, and so settled on offering him what small response she could manage. 

“Me too.”

Something in El’s gaze deepened as Mike looked at her, as he realised just how drier his lips had become and just how badly he wanted to be close to her. He wasn’t sure what he was mimicking, where it was coming from, but he had inclinations from memories here and there and the push of where his heart was pointing. El didn’t know what was coming but she understood that which they skirted, following him without question. 

He leaned in as she leaned in, and his lids were half closed, heavy, when the door burst open. 

 

…

 

He held her hand as they ran, as the sky above them warred between the dark and the light. As the bullets spattered against the tiles on the walls, staining cold stone with spilt ash and lost hope. 

“Just hold on a little longer, okay?” he pleaded of her, after they’d stopped running, and she was trembling atop the table. “He’s gone. The Bad Man’s gone. We'll be home soon, and my mom... she’ll get you your own bed. You can eat as many Eggos as you want. And we can go to the Snow Ball.” 

She could feel the vein in his wrist pulsing by hers, the weight of his heart where it poked against her ribs. 

Her fingers tightened in the crooks of his, as she whispered, “Promise?” 

He hesitated, lips chapped and ajar, but could not help himself. “Promise.” 

El knew that it was a promise broken before it was made, but she didn’t mind. She understood. 

Mike was her first friend, her best friend. The boy with lily skin and ebony eyes, who had helped her and kissed her and invited her to a school dance. He was a thief; a freckled boy who stole a ray of sunlight he found in the rain. He was how to get home. 

And this was why she knew, she had to say goodbye.

**Author's Note:**

> I realise that this is a bit different, and I'm sorry if it isn't really your cup of tea, but I wanted to post because I actually sort of like it? I hope you enjoyed, thank you for reading! - Bella xx


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